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Green innovation: This company is growing the future of automated agriculture

If your goal is to create a stable food supply on Earth, or elsewhere for that matter, one path to steady, environmentally friendly and readily-available crops is via the indoor farm, or vegetable factory.

Consider the implications for the planet and for space exploration: Clean, low-to-no pollution agriculture that doesn’t even require real sunlight to achieve sustainable cultivation.

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This is the vision at Spread, a Japan-based builder of the next generation of vegetable factories, and the company is at its next major threshold. As it prepares to open its flagship, highly automated factory in Kyoto, we look at what’s underway at Spread, and how the company stands to change the future of sustainably-produced food.

Inside Spread’s vegetable factory

Spread’s goal is a quality-controlled, high-yield indoor farming system that minimises water use, prevents soil erosion and avoids pesticides. Its facilities are designed to run under their own environmental control, from temperature to lighting to moisture, wholly independent of weather and conditions outside. That means year-long production, and near certainty that volume will be constant.

Spread has been operating a human-run prototype factory in Kameoka, Japan. The company’s plan for the next, Kyoto-based Vegetable Factory, slated to open in 2017, includes cutting carbon-dioxide emissions from the growing process. And the lettuce it will grow — think of lettuce as the proof-of-concept crop in the plan — is designed to produce vitamin-rich harvests.

“Currently four types of lettuce are produced, totaling 21,000 heads per day, that are shipped in a stable manner to approximately 2,000 stores throughout the year in the Tokyo metropolitan area and the Kansai region as the brand Vege-tus,” according to a company issued report on the project.

The Kyoto Plan: Robots and lettuce for the future

For Spread, the next stage of it vegetable factory development will emphasize the role of robots in the agricultural effort. The purpose of the change is to create cleaner, safer crops by significantly reducing key bacteria sources from much of the process — namely, germ-prone humans.

“In the current factory located outside of Kyoto city, in Kameoka, Japan, any workers that come into physical contact with the lettuce must wear a cleanroom suit and go through an air shower, which we think is a much more environmentally friendly approach,” than water showers, said J.J. Price, Global Marketing Manager at Spread.

“In the new Vegetable Factory,” he said, “the risk of contamination is further reduced since the majority of processes will be fully automated — from raising the seedling to harvest — which will reduce the direct contact the lettuce has with people.”

The new factory is designed to produce 30,000 heads of lettuce per day, or some 10 million per year. By comparison, according to National Geographic, the world’s largest indoor farm — also in Japan — was producing about 10,000 heads, daily, in 2014.

The price tag on the new project is sizable: a recent Spread report pegged the total investment at approximately 1.6–2 billion yen (about £10,9 million, as of November 2015) including the cost of research and development, plus testing facilities.

“The biggest challenge that we face is further decreasing the initial investment costs for construction, so that we can truly make this technology and technique affordable anywhere in the world,” said Price. “Operation costs have been falling due to advances in technology, such as more efficient LED lighting, water recycling, and air management systems. The introduction of automation also reduces many of the associated labor costs, so we believe that we are on the right track.”

Implications: Food security and extraterrestrial agriculture

Spread’s vision is about safe, clean food that takes less out of the environment when it comes to production. If the sustainable practices on which the company is working are viable in the longterm, the factories it’s designing will grow other crops as well.

“Of course, the obvious next step in terms of further applications would be to diversify the product line outside of lettuce and we think that this will play an important part in solving many of the world’s food security problems,” Price said.

But the company’s approach to the vegetable factory carries implications that go beyond remedying the carbon-load agriculture can place upon the Earth, and beyond the risks humans undertake when they use pesticides or expose produce to human- and animal-borne contaminants.

“For those who dream big, we can see this becoming an important part in space travel and colonisation,” said Price, “as our system can fundamentally be built in many different environments and provides a highly efficient method to use resources and produce food.”

From one head of lettuce may well grow the future of global and off-world food production. There’s a lot riding on Spread’s next step in Kyoto.

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